Molecular Research on Neuroblastoma: Current Status and Future Perspectives
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Oncology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2023) | Viewed by 6801
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Neuroblastoma (NB) is a childhood cancer that accounts for 8–15% of mortality of all childhood cancer. NB is a very heterogeneous disease depending on the treatment outcome. In the case of low-risk NB response to available therapy is better and survival outcome is good. On the contrary high-risk NB often do not respond to multimodal therapy and show relapse. A group of NB tumors also show spontaneous regression without any requirement for treatments. So, understanding the molecular mechanism which drives this heterogenicity in NB will help us to design treatment strategies that are more effective with less toxicity.
High-risk NB tumors usually have active telomere maintenance mechanisms by activation of Telomerase or by alternative lengthening (ALT) of telomeres. Amplification of MYCN oncogene and mutation in the Anaplastic Lymphoma Kinase (ALK) Receptor is frequently found in high-risk NB. Genomic aberration like 11q deletion or 17q gain is usually associated with the worst disease prognosis. NB is a disease of differentiation where embryonal migrating trunk neural crest cells fail to differentiate properly resulting in tumor formation. In recent years there is an increasing interest in Single-Cell RNA Sequencing of NB tumors to dissect the developmental trajectories and identify the cell types which contribute to NB tumor formation. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) also identified important genes which are associated with high-risk NB development using a large cohort of NB patients. GWAS studies also revealed long-noncoding RNAs which can contribute to the differentiation of trunk neural crest cells, thereby in NB tumor formation. Epigenetics plays a critical role in the maintenance of the transcriptional status of NB cells by maintaining active enhancers and thus provides flexibility to NB tumors to switch between adrenergic and mesenchymal lineages.
In this Special Issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences, we would like to invite authors to contribute with original research and review articles on different aspects of neuroblastoma research including molecular mechanisms which contribute to tumor formation, NB models, mechanisms of metastasis and relapse, telomere maintenance mechanism, tumor plasticity, and microenvironment, Single-cell RNA Sequencing, targeted treatment strategies, the contribution of noncoding RNAs, the role of epigenetics and transcription factors. The interest of this special issue will not be limited to the topics described here but rather will cover all types of original articles and reviews on molecular NB research. This will further enhance our understanding on NB disease mechanisms and help to design novel therapeutic strategies against high-risk NB.
Dr. Tanmoy Mondal
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- neuroblastoma
- neural crest cells
- telomeres
- epigenetics
- drug combination
- novel therapy
- disease models
- single-cell RNA sequencing
- non-coding RNA
- tumor cell plasticity
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